Social entrepreneurship

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Blog. The Impact of Better Teachers: $100 Trillion More in U.S. GDP. Forget the cliche of bringing an apple to your favorite teacher.
Social Impact Bonds: Lessons from the Field. How Schools' Poor Infrastructure Can Blunt EdTech Advances. Technology is often more of a spectator sport than anything else. In spite of elegant software like iOS5 and Android’s Ice Cream Sandwich, we are still at the mercy of the nearest cell-phone tower for a simple text message or phone call, or an open Wi-Fi signal to enjoy the latest streaming music app.
The Corporation As You Know It Is Probably Obsolete.

How Haiti's Earthquake Inspired LinkedIn's Skill-based Volunteer Marketplace. In 2010, a 7.0-magnitude earthquake stuck west of Port-au-Prince, Haiti’s capital, disrupting life for millions of residents and razing infrastructure across the impoverished country.

Blueseed: A Floating Startup Incubator Off The California Coast. You can lament retrograde American immigration laws that prevent highly skilled foreigners from coming here to work in the tech industry, or you can set up an office at sea.

Max Marty is trying the latter course. If all goes according to plan, his new company, Blueseed, will be the world’s first floating startup incubator, located on a ship off the coast of California. The idea is to provide a base of operations for foreign entrepreneurs who want to be close to Silicon Valley but can’t get a work visa. Marty and his cofounder Dario Mutabdzija plan to buy or lease a large ship, station it in international waters 12 nautical miles off the coast, and then rent out office space. Because Blueseed won’t technically be in the United States, foreign entrepreneurs aboard the ship will be able to skirt certain immigration laws.
Pay for Success: How a New Kind of Bond Could Save Taxpayer Money and Improve Social Services - Business. Two federal agencies will steer tax money for social programs through a new for-profit investing tool tested in the United Kingdom and Australia, according to a report co-authored by the White House and the Nonprofit Finance Fund.

Rather than providing social services directly, the bonds will allow the government to task a firm in the private sector to solve a public challenge, paying the company only if it achieves certain success metrics. Using pay-for-success bonds could save taxpayer money, earn a profit for impact investors, and incentivize innovation to solve chronic social challenges. In the United States, this is all theoretical at this point, but 2012 may be the year that changes. The Department of Labor will make available $20 million for pay-for-success projects that help Americans find work through its Workforce Innovation Fund.
Former "Seasteaders" Come Ashore To Start Libertarian Utopias In Honduran Jungle. The seasteader-in-chief is headed ashore.

Patri Friedman (that’s Milton Friedman's grandson to you), who stepped down as the chief executive of the Peter Thiel-backed Seasteading Institute in August, has resurfaced as the CEO of a new for-profit enterprise named Future Cities Development Inc., which aims to create new cities from scratch (on land this time) governed by "cutting-edge legal systems.
" The startup may have found its first taker in Honduras, whose government amended its constitution in January to permit the creation of special autonomous zones exempt from local and federal laws.

Future Cities has signed a non-binding memorandum of understanding to build a city in one such zone starting next year.
Charles Leadbeater on innovation. Www.charlesleadbeater.net/cms/xstandard/social_enterprise_innovation.pdf. EdSurge. Philosophy of Education. 1.

Problems in delineating the field There is a large—and ever expanding—number of works designed to give guidance to the novice setting out to explore the domain of philosophy of education; most if not all of the academic publishing houses have at least one representative of this genre on their list, and the titles are mostly variants of the following archetypes: The History and Philosophy of Education, The Philosophical Foundations of Education, Philosophers on Education, Three Thousand Years of Educational Wisdom, A Guide to the Philosophy of Education, and Readings in Philosophy of Education.

Part of the explanation for this diffuse state of affairs is that, quite reasonably, many philosophers of education have the goal (reinforced by their institutional affiliation with Schools of Education and their involvement in the initial training of teachers) of contributing not to philosophy but to educational policy and practice. 1.1 The open nature of philosophy and philosophy of education. Aestheticism. The Peacock Room, Aesthetic Movement designed by James Abbott McNeill Whistler, one of the most famous examples of Aesthetic style interior design Aestheticism (or the Aesthetic Movement) is an art movement supporting the emphasis of aesthetic values more than social-political themes for literature, fine art, music and other arts.[1][2] It was particularly prominent in Europe during the 19th century, but contemporary critics are also associated with the movement, such as Harold Bloom, who has recently argued against projecting social and political ideology onto literary works, which he believes has been a growing problem in humanities departments over the last century.

Aesthetic literature[edit] The British decadent writers were much influenced by the Oxford professor Walter Pater and his essays published during 1867–68, in which he stated that life had to be lived intensely, with an ideal of beauty. Aesthetic visual arts[edit] Aesthetic Movement decorative arts[edit]
Non-profit or for-profit?
Microfinance, so why not Micro-Education?
To begin, microfinance in its strictest sense does not propose to alleviate poverty nor is it the panacea for all developing country (and developed for that matter) woes.

What it does do is provide access to formal financial services for hundreds of millions of people left out of the traditional formal financial sector. Microfinance provides steady credit lines, places to save (those that offer it), with the long-term goal/hope that those accessing these services will in turn graduate up-market to the previously mentioned formal financial sector. Now, if a market exists, with profits to be gained by lending to the poor, why would this not work with education.

It’s more complex, I recognize that. Lending money from a financial entity to a single person is direct and relatively cut and dry. Fast forward to the U.S.
Microschools – Opportunity International’s Contribution for Achieving MDG 2 « International Affairs – Analysis and Reflections. Microschools of Opportunity™ The United Nation’s Millennium Development Goals (MDG’s), established at the Millennium Summit in 2000, consist of eight goals related to international development topics such as poverty eradication (#1), promotion of gender equality (#3), global health issues (#6), or environmental sustainability (#7), and to which all UN member states have agreed to accomplish by 2015.

International launches Microschools™ – new frontier in breaking the chain of poverty. New research shows ‘schools for the poor’ outperform public schools in developing world Oak Brook, Ill. – July 31, 2007 – Opportunity International, a leading innovator in the microfinance industry, today announced the expansion of its microfinance school loans program to bring greater educational opportunity to poor children, especially girls.

Private Schools for the Poor. The accepted wisdom is that private schools serve the privileged; everyone else, especially the poor, requires public school.

The poor, so this logic goes, need government assistance if they are to get a good education, which helps explain why, in the United States, many school choice enthusiasts believe that the only way the poor can get the education they deserve is through vouchers or charter schools, proxies for those better private or independent schools, paid for with public funds. But if we reflect on these beliefs in a foreign context and observe low-income families in underprivileged and developing countries, we find these assumptions lacking: the poor have found remarkably innovative ways of helping themselves, educationally, and in some of the most destitute places on Earth have managed to nurture a large and growing industry of private schools for themselves.

Education & Empowerment Technology Design. Creating the National Laboratory for Education Transformation, or NLET, has been a fascinating journey. The idea is simple enough. On the one hand, we know that education systems, learning strategies, and knowledge access have to change.
Mon, 11/21/2011.

Venture Capital and the Finance of Innovation (9780470074282): Andrew Metrick. How to Break Into Venture Capital. What Do You Do as a Venture Capitalist?
Www.mycapital.com/VenetureCapital101_MyCapital.pdf. Www.dblinvestors.com/portfolio-detail.php#livescribe. Impact investing: Happy returns. Social Finance. J.P. Morgan's Social Finance business provides financial services to the growing market for impact investments, meaning those investments made with an intent to generate impact beyond financial return.
Social Entrepreneurs 2011: Impact Investors. All investors obsess about returns. But for impact investors, ROI is an especially tricky matter, because in addition to financial success, they are seeking social and environmental results.

Givology. Ed Tech Map: NewSchools Venture Fund. The EdTech Market continues to grow and diversify. We started with a map of a 150-200 companies with help from Education Elements and Clayton Christensen Institute for Disruptive Innovation.
Venture Investing, The Socially Responsible Way - Venture Capital Dispatch. Teach For All: Network: Locations & Programs. College Achievement.

As U.S. politicians continue to debate the merits of allowing parents to choose their children’s schools, research financed by the Department of Education has found that school choice programs significantly improve the future educational prospects of children who might otherwise attend lower quality schools. On Monday the National Bureau of Economic Research released a working paper written by Harvard, Dartmouth and Brown University researchers, providing “the first evidence of the impact of school choice on the college achievement gap.” The researchers, two economists and two education policy experts, looked at Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools in North Carolina and the effect of their school choice program “on college matriculation and degree completion.”
Study Shows School Choice Improves College Achievement Gap.

A study funded by the Department of Education found that school choice programs have a positive impact on student achievement in college, the Daily Caller reports. On Monday, the National Bureau of Economic Research released a working paper written by Harvard, Dartmouth and Brown University researchers, providing “the first evidence of the impact of school choice on the college achievement gap.”

The target of the study was the Charlotte-Mecklenburg School District in North Carolina.